Beginning today, I’ll be posting piecemeal, online, the contents of Food & Dining Magazine’s Spring 2026 (Vol. 89) print issue.
In the aftermath of John Carlos White’s untimely passing, we all entertained a hope that the issue might yet be published in its traditional print format. However, an estate in probate bodes ill for the timeliness of material intended to be consumed prior to Kentucky Derby 152.
For now, I’m releasing my contributions only, for the simplest of reasons: I’ve given myself permission to do so. Other permissions surely will follow. Hopefully, in a week’s time, there will be a compendium of links uniting these installments.
After that, I’ll continue doing what I can to keep the magazine’s flame lit at the website and on social media, while awaiting a verdict. If I were clairvoyant, I’d provide readers with more detailed information about the future of Food & Dining Magazine. However, its ultimate disposition lies somewhere above and beyond my pay grade, with John’s family.
F&D has come to mean very much to me, and John’s loss has been an emotional challenge in ways I didn’t foresee. We talked often, and I’m serene in the knowledge that I thanked him often for his support of my writing during the past two decades. There are ways I can imagine the magazine continuing, tempered by the knowledge that without John’s presence, it couldn’t possibly be the same.
That’s life, I suppose.
By all rights, the past two months should have witnessed an outpouring of “40 Years in Beer” installments, which were paused as I worked on F&D’s Spring 2026 edition. Honestly, neither my head nor my heart has been in the effort apart from outlining the next few essays; see “emotionally challenge,” preceding.
I won’t kid you. I did some of my very best work as a beer planner while at Pints&union, the beer program was very successful, and it ended squalidly, stupidly and senselessly in 2023 amid Joe’s unresolved mental health issues.
Then, thanks to John Carlos White, my reinvention as a writer and editor provided just what I needed; frankly, I’ve seldom felt happier in a professional sense. Now F&D is in limbo. There’s a monthly social security check, and that’s pleasant enough, but what the hell am I going to do next to earn a few farthings?
It’s not depressing. It’s demoralizing. My brain is fine; it’s my morale that’s low.
I’m a writer, and the human race is on the verge of discontinuing reading in favor of 45-second videos. I’m a beer guy with skills that remain intact, and the “better beer” world is coming apart at the seams. I’m to the left of Bernie Sanders, surrounded by braying MAGAs, pestiferous Christian nationalists and racist know-nothings. I’m a music lover desperately seeking a melody untainted by AutoTune.
But home life is good. I cook, clean when it becomes inevitable, and lecture the cats. The 1117 East Spring St. Neighborhood Association continues to serve as a de facto European consulate, with a library that offers daily refuge from the prevailing doltishness of New Albany officialdom.
Earlier in 2026 came the long overdue replacement of my stereo amplifier, so I’ve returned to my office in the rear of the house, sparing me the brutish cacophony of HyperCars, and enabling classical and jazz music sans headphones as integral boosts to creativity.
Evidently it’s me against the world, and those are an underdog’s odds that I’ve always cherished. I don’t cheer for overlords, oligarchs and cults of personality.
It remains that what excited me the most at the outset of my European travel career 41 years ago was history, geography, literature, music and art, as components of what we call the Western canon.
The Western canon is the body of books, music, and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. It includes works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art, sculpture, and architecture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit and representing the high culture of Europe and North America. Philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as “a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature”.
Delayed onset adulthood kicked in for me when I finally accepted that incessantly craving ever greater exposure to this body of knowledge wasn’t a bad thing for a hick from somewhere near French Lick. In fact it was a very good thing, and the pursuit of culture made me happy in and of itself.
And it still does. I’m not quite bright enough to be a true intellectual, but it’s important to have goals in life, and I can pretend with the best of them. If this means harboring a curative disdain for dumbassery, all the better. After all, H.L. Mencken remains a hero to me.
Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself–by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.
What happens next? Beats me. We’re going to Vienna soon, with a side trip to Budapest to celebrate the defeat of Trump’s non-intellectual mentor Orban. Travel invariably brightens my mood, and time heals wounds.
Thanks for reading.
